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“Without me, buddy, there is no you,” snaps Rust Cohle at his partner Marty Hart in this week’s episode of True Detective. And boy did he say a mouthful. (Spoilers ahead for True Detective to Episode 106)

All this started when Marty, who’s pissed off at being saddled with the paperwork after Cohle snagged another confession, vented as only he can. “I’m the only one who ever took up for you. Ever. You know what it’s like being your partner? Fuck you.”

His quick rejoinder-- “Without me, buddy, there is no you”—was nothing more than Cohle making clean contact with a batting practice fastball, the smartest guy in the room proving it yet again, thank you very much.

But that’s how it goes with Rustin Cohle. When he’s trying to concoct a grand theory to explain time, space and the meaninglessness of existence, he comes up a dollar short. But when he’s simply trying to be a smart ass, he hits on a larger truth. Maybe the largest one of all.

At face value, what Rustin Cohle says is true. No Rust = No Marty. From the very beginning of True Detective, one thing has been clear: Cohle has what Marty wants. Cohle is natural po-lice and that’s what Marty always wanted to be. If he can’t change his nature, he can at least learn a thing or two, and bask in the reflected glory of yet another confession.

But so is its opposite. No Marty = No Rust. In a way that’s less obvious, Marty has what Cohle needs. The ability to compartmentalize, to put down a case and then tell the story in a cop bar, to go home, watch the basketball game and ignore his kids, and to use his hero status to chase leggy brunettes with come-hither smiles. It may not seem like much of a skill set, but it eludes Rust Cohle just the same.

So we’re left with this story about these two complementary pieces. Polar opposites who attract and repel at the same time. One burdened with too much self knowledge, the other with not enough.

They’re the bayou’s answer to Oscar and Felix, a post-modern Odd Couple. And like the guys who shared that Manhattan apartment while driving each other crazy, Cohle and Hart understand each other profoundly. Probably too well.

Marty needs Rust. And Rust needs Marty.

Until Maggie got between them. When Marty went back to his brunette-banging ways, she saw her play, although she didn’t think it through completely. She knew instinctively how it would hurt Marty. Although if she bothered to consider it, she would have realized that she was letting him off the hook, allowing him to return to those easier things—beer, brunettes and basketball— without guilt because it was, after all, all her fault. But she didn’t understand what it would do to Rust.

She always understood that her husband’s partner had something that her husband lacked. “Rust knew exactly who he was and there was no talking him out of it,” she told Papania and Gilbough. “Marty’s single big problem was he never really knew himself so he never knew what to want.”

That’s why that two-minute tryst in Rust’s kitchen could have been the beginning of something as well as the end. But the look on Michelle Monaghan’s face said it all. She was 49 percent enthralled by the possibility of a deeper connection. And 51 percent scared to death at the thought of what she destroyed.

Rust had no such ambivalence. He saw nothing but a couple more lives he had ruined.

In those flash forwards from 2002 to 2012, we’ve already seen the aftermath of Rust and Maggie’s quick assignation. Marty’s fat and bored, a pasty, muted version of the jerk he’s been all along. Rust, however, took a decade-long dive toward rock bottom, and the Allman Brothers hair and the Lone Stars before noon is the least of it. He understands the gravity of his moment of weakness, and he can’t help but punish himself.

That’s because Rust’s off-hand statement also touches on a bigger truth that lies at the heart of True Detective: “Without me, there is no you.” That statement is all about community. It’s about the self, and the other and what we are to each other. About how we complete each other in ways that Cameron Crowe could never understand.

But when you’re a murder police, it’s also about what we do to each other. And Rust Cohle saw this every day, from Reggie Ledoux to the Marshland Medea. He lived that anguish first hand with what he did to his own baby daughter. His little monologue about preserving her innocence is nothing more than an inadequate apology from a man with a broken heart.

Author Nic Pizzolatto said as much in an e-mail interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Far from ‘nothing meaning anything’ to him, it’s almost as though everything means too much to him,” he explained. “He’s too passionate, too acutely sensitive, and he cares too much to be labeled a successful nihilist.”

And even in his superficial way, Marty understands this about his ex-partner. He knows that his ex-partner can be the Michael Jordan of being a son-of-a-bitch. But he also knows that he’s not a monster, but instead a guy who’s haunted by them. And that’s why, when the red Ford pickup pulls up behind, Marty stops the car. Without me, buddy, there is no you.

What's your take on Hart and Cohle's relationship? Maggie's role in the breakup? Share your thoughts in the comments below.